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Show earning your way. I always focused on the licorice, thinking it a shame he didn't choose chocolate. My father and his brothers watched Westerns on those Saturdays, Red River, 3 Godfathers, Shane, movies where the good guys wore white, the bad guys, black, and the hero saved the day. Endings as tidy as the well-spent quarter. Sometimes it was a double feature, and they would beg their parents to wait just a little longer so they could see them both. A second story, one further back, before the syringes, speaks to their poverty but also to the ordinary experiences that both shaped and broke him, the way, I suppose, the steady march of childhood always creates and destroys. Poverty in the late 1940s in a small, Midwestern town was more democratic than poverty today. No one around my father had money. Some of his friends came from families with larger farms, owned more Harvester silos, had a second tractor, but no one lived easily or well. Not an abstraction of any kind, the Depression lurked along the edges of every interaction, a guest who had stayed too long. My father never went to bed hungry, but he also learned not to ask for anything and never to waste. Each year he and his three brothers received one new pair of overalls, the pair they would wear to town or to church. The "church" pair from last year, now patched, became the everyday ones. I have a picture of the four of them, my father maybe six, his older brother Jerry towering above, arms thrown wide like a cloak over his brothers' shoulders, Bill, on the edge, and Keith, the baby, standing in front of my father, all 17 |